The children are ragged and dirty, their hair matted, their upper lips caked with sweat and snot. Many of them are barefoot, their feet so filthy it looks like they are wearing boots. Some of them are only eight or nine, and some are in their early teens. They say nothing, just stand there looking wide-eyed at Chit, the door-shaped man.
There are fifteen or twenty in all. Over the hum of traffic from the boulevard, Chit can hear them breathe. Three more appear at the alley’s mouth.
The boy says, “Thirty seconds.”
Chit draws his lips back, baring his teeth as though he is about to take a bite out of the boy’s throat. His hand goes to his pocket and emerges with a wad of twenties. With his eyes fixed on the boy’s, he counts off five of them, holds them out, and drops them to the ground.
The boy bends down and picks them up. “Thank you,” he says, as politely as if they’d been neatly folded and handed to him in an envelope. He puts them into his pocket and turns to go.
“Wait,” Chit says. The boy pauses, but the other children are already melting away. “Tomorrow night.”
The boy says, “No. There are other police, not as greedy as you.”
“Try it,” Chit says. “See how long you live.”
The boy turns back to him. “I could say the same to you.” He looks up and down the alley, taking in the remaining children. “They could be anywhere,” he says. “Any time. Waiting for you.”
Chit surveys the upraised faces, smells the dirt and sweat. He raises both hands, palms out. “All right, all right. No more bargaining. Fifteen percent off the top.” The boy is impassive. “Twenty,” Chit says.
“Tomorrow,” the boy says. He saunters to the end of the alley and goes left, onto the sidewalk of the boulevard. The children drift away.
Chit’s eyes burn holes into the boy’s back. He turns to the handcuffed man and slaps him hard, then slaps him again. Then he catches the taller man’s eye and jerks his chin upward, a command. The taller man reaches behind the prisoner, and a moment later the man’s hands are free.
This is not what the prisoner had expected. The thought ricochets through his mind:
He flinches when Chit’s hand comes up, but it holds nothing except the prisoner’s wallet. Chit removes the cash, then pulls out a slender deck of credit cards. “Gerhardt,” he says, reading the name off the top card. “Gerhardt, around the corner is an ATM. You withdraw everything you can get on all your cards and give it to me. Tomorrow morning you leave Thailand. Understand?”
Gerhardt says, “I…I leave? You mean, no jail?”
Chit says, “And you never come back.”
Gerhardt starts to thank him and then bursts into tears.
5
It’s an eight.
The other six men at the table barely give it a glance, but Rafferty suddenly has a buzzing in his ears that sounds like a low-voltage power line. He squeezes his eyes closed and opens them again.
It’s still an eight.
The Big Guy leans forward, watching him. He passes the tube over his lips and says, in that high, buttery voice, “The farang is interested.”
Rafferty barely hears him. If he were forced at gunpoint to make an estimate-and it’s looking increasingly likely that someone will be at gunpoint soon-Rafferty would put the value of the chips in the pot somewhere in the neighborhood of 750,000 baht-about $24,000 U.S. Not exactly the national debt, but certainly the largest amount he’s ever risked on the turn of a card.
Of course, he’s only been playing for ten days.
Feeling the Big Guy’s eyes on him, he grabs eight chips off his stack and clicks them together four times. He does his best to make the gesture seem natural, but it feels like the staged business it is, transparently phony, bad blocking in an amateur play. He closes his hand around the chips and finds them wet with sweat.
The Big Guy leans back in his chair, his pink mouth puckering around his cigar. The bodyguards watch everyone else.
The man three seats to Rafferty’s right had dealt the hand. He’s a sallow-faced man in a shiny suit that’s either brown or green depending on the light, but not a good shade of either. He waits indifferently for the man to his left to make his move. The man, one of the businessmen, makes a tight little mouth like a reluctant kiss and throws in a couple thousand. The uniformed man on the businessman’s other side, Rafferty’s friend Arthit, has the bet in hand and tosses it into the pot with the air of someone making a donation at the temple of an unreliable god. The moment Rafferty has been dreading has arrived. He tries to look thoughtful as he waits to be told what to do.
The one whose job it is to tell him, seated directly opposite him at the round green felt table, is as lean as a matador and as dark as a used teabag, with a hatchet-narrow face, and hair that has been dyed so black it has blue highlights. With his eyes resting lazily on the pile of chips in the center of the table, he turns the signet ring on his right hand so the stone is beneath his finger and then brings it back up again.
The hum in Rafferty’s ears rises in pitch, as though the power line has been stretched tighter. The room seems to brighten.
It takes all of Rafferty’s willpower to keep his hands steady as he pushes his entire pile of chips toward the center of the green felt. He says, “I’m all in.”
There is a general shifting around the table as people adjust themselves in their chairs and survey the new landscape of risk. Rafferty has about 290,000 baht in chips-he’s been having a selectively good night, just barely not good enough to be suspicious. This is a bet that could remove at least two of the players from the game.
One of them is the Big Guy.
Four days ago, when this game was being planned, there had been only three people in the room: Rafferty, Arthit, and the hatchet-faced man. They had been sitting in a dingy meeting room in a police station, a room to which the hatchet-faced man had been brought directly from his jail cell. He’d been promised six months off his sentence if he succeeded in fooling the pigeons-the businessmen-at the table, thereby guaranteeing that he’d do his best with the four dodges he was to perform during the game. Arthit and the other policeman, whose name is Kosit, had been promised a “consideration” of 50,000 baht apiece by the casino owners who were looking for ways to spot the dodges, and for whose enlightenment the game is secretly being videotaped.
But no one had expected the Big Guy.
And now, seated to Rafferty’s left, he blows out a quart of cigar smoke and leans back in his chair. His eyes flick to Rafferty again and then away. Late forties, strong as a horse beneath fifteen pounds of soft, wet fat, he holds the cigar dead center in a tightly pursed mouth.
He says in English, “Bluff.”
“Easy to find out,” Rafferty says. His heart is beating so hard he can actually feel the cloth of his shirt brush his chest.
A cloud of smoke, waved away so the Big Guy can peer down at Rafferty’s chips. “How much is that,
“Two hundred ninety-two thousand,” Rafferty says.
“I’ve only got two-eighty-five.”
“In or out?” asks the dealer.
“In,” says the Big Guy. He pushes his chips into the center of the felt and then drops the last few thousand- baht chips on top of the pile, one at a time. Then he switches to Thai. “Look at your money,” he says, “because you’re never going to see it again.”
The hatchet-faced man throws in his cards. The dealer and the man next to him also fold. Arthit takes a last look at the faceup cards and then mucks his own, making it unanimous. The man to Rafferty’s right, who has
